GIFF to adopt filmmakers and spotlight Colombia

By Daniel Kandell

The Guanajuato International Film Festival (GIFF) returns to San Miguel de Allende along with its “Adopt a Filmmaker” program! Between the dates of July 18 – 24, GIFF will receive talented filmmakers and accomplished film professionals from around the world. The festival looks for assistance from the local community to help give these visiting guests a warm San Miguel welcome!

Hosting a film festival guest in your home means being able to share with him or her a bit of our fortunate world, offering them a glimpse into the true San Miguel lifestyle. Welcoming these artists into your beautiful home is a kind, intimate and friendly gesture that few tourists or visitors normally get to experience. Help us make our guests feel at home and be their guide by orienting them around town and answering questions that may arise during their stay in our beautiful city.

Your generosity helps us preserve the homegrown spirit of the festival, while contributing to the further development of the cinematographic arts and the positive promotion of our beautiful city. Each adoption includes friends for life and your participation is greatly appreciated and handsomely rewarded by granting Adopters access to some of the festival’s most popular special events. For more information on how to adopt, please contact Eva Tatum at 044-415-115-2960 or email her at adopt@guanajuatofilmfestival.com.

This July GIFF welcomes Colombia as their Guest Country of Honor. The Colombian Spotlight program will include nearly 100 films of both historic and contemporary programming, an ample industry section, special conferences and live presentations.

Some of the Colombian films we have to look forward to include the outdoor screening of the documentary Apaporis, secretos de la selva (2010) by director José Antonio Dorado Zuñiga in the Jardin on Saturday, July 20, Colombian Independence Day. The documentary follows the steps of ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, based on his travel diary, from Mitú to the Apaporis River, documenting indigenous knowledge and revealing the millenary secrets of how to revive the dead.

A Paper Tiger (2007) by Colombian director Luis Ospina follows Pedro Manrique Figueroa, Colombia’s pioneering collage artist, who has never had a biographer. The reason is simple: his life, like an adventure novel, is incomplete, contradictory, and constantly linked to the sparkling uncertainties of oral tradition. Framed around Manrique Figueroa’s life and work, the film takes us on a journey through history from 1934 to 1981, the year when the artist mysteriously disappeared from public view.

GIFF returns to the Panteón (graveyard) near Salida Celaya as part of their Cine entre muertos (Movies with Mummy) program, where each year they screen horror films at the stroke of midnight among the tombstones, the mausoleums and the dead. This year sees a pair of horror films from Colombian director Andi Baiz. La Cara oculta (2012) is a sexy thriller that explores the limits of love, jealousy and betrayal. And Satanás (2007) features three characters looking for love, redemption and second chances in a world reigned by their own fears, temptations, passions and pains, which will end up in a trigger effect of tragic events.

The Guanajuato International Film Festival runs from July 19 to 23 in San Miguel de Allende and July 24 to 28 in Guanajuato Capital. A complete schedule can be found in upcoming issues of Atención as well as on the festival’s website after July 8: www.giff.mx.